THE QUICKENING
Michelle Hoover

www.otherpress.com 
www.michellehoover.net

Other Press
distributed by Random House
$14.95  Trade Paperback Original
ISBN:  978-1-59051-346-0
July 2010
Fiction / Midwest rural farming life

Featured on Twin Cities Live “What to Read Next” on July 26! 
JULY 26 BOOK SEGMENT
Click here for more info. 

Told in lyrical prose in the voices of two women, within a landscape that binds and challenges all members of their families, THE QUICKENING is a story of survival and hardship, violence and betrayal, and the discovery and loss of lifelong love.

“This is a book about survival under great hardship and an exploration of the lengths to which a person will go in order to survive.” 
- Lanora Hurley, Next Chapter Bookshop, Mequon, WI 

“Kudos to Michelle Hoover for creating two of the strongest female characters in recent fiction! Set in the Midwest, this story of two equally powerful but entirely dissimilar farm women, Enidina and Mary, starts slowly and quietly, building to a crescendo as loud and furious as the pinnacle of this book. It is a spell-binding story. The fact that Hoover used her great-grandmother’s journals as a foundation for this strong debut is frosting on this literary cake.” 
– Nancy Simpson, Book Vault, Oskaloosa, IA

 “I grew up among Iowa farm women, and Michelle Hoover has perfectly captured their voices and stories with great wisdom, tenderness, and beauty.” 
—Ted Kooser, U. S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006 

 “THE QUICKENING is a rare jewel of a novel: an elegantly structured page-turner driven as much by its exquisite lyricism as it is by the gripping story at its core. It wondrously weaves a riveting half-century of American Midwestern history through the sensual, intimate, often strange details that make up a life. Michelle Hoover is a stunning writer and this is a fierce and beautiful book.”
—Maud Casey, author of Genealogy *

“Hoover’s powerful debut tells the story of the intertwined fortunes of two early 20th-century Midwestern farm women. From the time Enidina Current and her husband, Frank, move into the hardscrabble farmhouse a day’s wagon ride away from Enidina’s family, their closest neighbors, Jack and Mary Morrow, perplex them, though their proximity and shared farm work often bring the two couples together. Sharing the narrative, stoic Enidina struggles through several miscarriages before finally bearing twins, while the more delicate Mary reels from disappointment, most of all in her volatile husband. Moving through the Depression, the families are driven farther apart from each other, even while Mary’s youngest spends most of his time in the Current household, until an accident and a betrayal drive the final wedge into their lives. In this finely wrought and starkly atmospheric narrative, Hoover’s characters carry deep secrets, and their emotions are as intense as the acts of nature that shape their world.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Watch the video for THE QUICKENING on  YouTube –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ure0egyjU8

Meet author Michelle Hoover at these MBA member bookstores:

7/27/10 – IA Book Vault (Oskaloosa): Reading and Signing

7/29/10 – IA Beaverdale Books (Des Moines): Reading and Signing

8/1/10 – MN Magers & Quinn (Minneapolis): Reading and Signing

8/2/10 – MN The Book Shelf (Winona): Reading and signing

8/4/10 – WI Next Chapter Books (Mequon): Reading and Signing

8/5/10 – WI Books & Company (Oconomowoc): Reading and Signing

Buy this book from your favorite locally owned and operated Midwest independent bookseller!
Click here for the directory of our member bookstores

MBA BOOKSELLER INFORMATION

Booksellers — Earn up to $100 in rebates from MBA for promoting THE QUICKENING!
Midwest Connections rebate form for THE QUICKENING (PDF) – available now!

THE QUICKENING is available from Other Press and distributed by Random House or from your preferred wholesaler.  Be sure to contact the publisher for more information about this title. 

If you are interested in scheduling an event, interview, or book club event or phoner with author Michelle Hoover, please contact Suzanne Williams, Shreve Williams Public Relations, 908.955.4060,  Suzanne@shrevewilliams.com.  Hoover  lives in Boston , so her availability for in-person events is limited.

MBA and Other Press would love to have your comments and reviews for this Midwest Connections Pick. Please send them to us so we can share your endorsements with your fellow MBA booksellers and with your customers!

DOWNLOADS

SIGN FOR JULY 26 FEATURED BOOKS (PDF) — for Twin Cities Live “What to Read Next”
SHELF-TALKERS FOR JULY 26 FEATURED BOOKS (PDF) — for Twin Cities Live “What to Read Next”

Note:  The shelf-talkers need to be printed on card stock and cut apart along crop marks. Each book has its own shelf-talker, which is double so that it can be used either on the shelf under the book, or as a slip card standing up from the top of the book like a large bookmark.

• Ames, IA  Tribune  review of the book (link)  
• Full-color sign/flyer (PDF)
• Full-color shelf-talker (PDF)
• Press release (PDF)
• Author’s Note (PDF)
• Author Q&A (PDF)
• Author photo (JPG)
• Book cover photo (JPG) – high res
• Book cover photo (JPG) – low res
• Midwest Connections rebate form for THE QUICKENING (PDF)
• Midwest Connections Generic Display Materials

ABOUT THE BOOK

“Michelle Hoover’s fine debut novel recreates for us a way of life and a set of personalities that have vanished from our current scene, and she does so with a solidity of detail that will impress these people and these places forever on your memory.”
– Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love

“Hoover paints stormy scenes of individuals and communities at odds with one another and with their own dark histories in a vivid, pastoral panorama.  Ultimately, this is the story of survival—how life quickens and is borne on through turmoil, pain and perseverance… imbued throughout with a careful and evenly wrought lyricism.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Hoover drew on a 15-page recollection left by her great-grandmother for this novel set in rural Iowa early in the last century. . . . [and] succeeds in creating a sense of what life was like for women in that time and place.” — Booklist

Loosely based on her own family’s history, THE QUICKENING tells the fictional story of the bitter feud  that emerges between two Iowa farming families.  Years ago, Hoover discovered an old family document—the fifteen pages were poorly typed, with her great-grandmother’s name and date of birth, 1880, at the top.   Perhaps my life, it read, and that of my dear husband has meant little or nothing to anyone except to us and our immediate family.  Written during the last year of her great-grandmother’s life, it was a reflection on a long life of hardship and loss on the family’s Iowa farm, and covered more than seventy years.

 In THE QUICKENING, hard-worn Enidina Current and passionate Mary Morrow live on neighboring farms in the flat, hard country of the upper Midwest. Drawn together out of loneliness, female companionship, and necessity, Enidina and Mary forge a profound bond soon challenged by a series of disquieting events. As conflict simmers between their two families and the Great Depression threatens their livelihoods, Mary struggles with her conscience over a secret she keeps from her abusive husband, and Enidina fights to hold her marriage, family, and farm together.  Told in their two voices in lyrical prose, within a landscape that binds and challenges them all, THE QUICKENING is a story of survival and hardship, violence and betrayal, and the discovery and loss of lifelong love.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michelle Hoover was born in Ames, Iowa, and is descended from four generations of Iowa farmers.  She teaches writing at Boston University and Grub Street.  Her fiction has been published in Confrontation, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, StoryQuarterly, and Best New American Voices.  She is a finalist for New Letter’s Dorothy Churchill Cappon Essay Prize and has been a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference scholar, the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction.  For more information visit www.michellehoover.net